Mandriva 2008.1 Spring Edition : Breath Of Fresh Air

I was tempting to get my hands on the newer Mandriva Spring from the date it was released .. and to my surprise all the Magazine here in India included Mandriva 2008.1 as their distro of the Month.. Finally I got the Mandriva 2008.1 One KDE Edition courtesy Digit.. After that I got the Magz I look no further and without wasting any more time I burned the DVD.. Next day I popped up the Media and was greeted with the spanking new Boot Screen .. My friend sitting beside my computer glared at it, like he hasn't seen such an artwork.. After that it keeps on booting the system.. I was surprised that the Live Cd took only seconds to boot through the configuration screen.. Mandriva lets you configure you network , choose your keyboard layout, language , set/disable effects before you loads into your Live Desktop..


After configuring I was shunned by the cool Log In sound .. Though the sound is same as the one that comes in 2008.0 but still I love it.. After that I was greeted with Mandriva Introduction Screen that will educate about Mandriva and its derivatives.. The Live CD of Mandriva was pretty fast in term of booting.. I was very impressed that it actually load the desktop in few minutes



The Default Desktop consist 7 Icons .. Out of them 2 of them are aimed to promote Mandriva .. One icon will lead you to Mandriva Club so that you can join it and the other suggest you upgrade to Power Pack Edition. Some people have problem that Mandriva put those icon promoting their commercial version but its ok with me. Every One has the right to promote their things So if you don't like just trash those Icons..
After lurking around a bit I fired the Installer .. You can install it as the Install Icon is present at the default desktop.. The Install shield hasn't gone through a major overhaul and that's a nice thing as the Installer is very easy and quite compact..


The Installer as usual is superb , it went like a breeze .. 3-4 Steps only and bingo you installed an OS.. My friend was stunned to see the GUI partitioning tool during Installation.. He abruptly said.. WoW its way better than Windows partitioning tool.. Well the installation ended in 6.8 minutes and he was baffled to see that an Os installation ended in mere 7 minutes..Few more seconds were spent on later configuration grub and after that I did a restart..


The Installer and the Live Cd has gone through major Overhaul.. I noticed that their Country and Language Support has increased drastically.. Unlike the previous version ,Mandriva 2008.1 now has India on their country list not even this , while setting up Internet connection it will allow you to choose your ISP from India ... Though there is no mentioned name under that option. But seems like it will be done in the next release.
The grub now detects your Windows Vista and other Linux Installation [if present] and will automatically add the entry to your Menu.lst.


So far so good lets take a deep look into the application and the core system of Mandriva Spring